Gone Are The Days
by Leslet
Summary: Set 5 minutes after 12:22. Abby POV. Luby. Definate spoilers.


Title: Gone are the Days

Author: Leslet

Disclaimer: Don't anything, if I did...I won't bother saying because it's never going to happen...

This fic contains SPOILERS for episode 13:2

As she wakes, she mostly feels the way in which her lungs seem to weak to breathe, bone deep exhaustion seeping from deep in her core out through to every part of her body. She thinks only of the abyss from which she has just come. Believing that the blackness is her only logical destination.

But then a voice calls her name, distant yet familiar, tempting with faint recognition and her curiosity fuels her will to swim to the surface of her consciousness.

"Abby, can you hear me?"

_Yes,_ she can hear, but barely remembers how to respond.

"Luka"

The words are faint as they part from her lips. She doesn't recall the place or time in which she currently resides. But that name is comfort. She'll be fine now.

The world is shamelessly cruel as she opens her eyes for the first time. Not five minutes since she last remembers consciousness.

Her friends are bleeding, she is bleeding, her child is bleeding and she feels as though she every drop she lost is her fault. She should've gotten checked out. She hadn't felt right, she'd pushed herself into autopilot, forced an 'I'm OK" And she wasn't. Something was very, very wrong.

Luka enters the room and he has been through hell. His normally tidy hair sticks in all directions, his wrists are red with the remnants of struggle, his face bruised and teary by resistance, and yet all he cares about is her.

She doesn't completely understand what is happening. The world swirls around her, tests are completed, people comfort her, her hand is held and she feels nothing but the numbness of too much to fear.

"What's wrong?" she begs for answers.

And sad eyes turn to her, desperate not to tell her.

"It looks like placental abruption, Abby. You need a C-section. Your son needs to be born, NOW"

"Son?" Luka answers her unspoken question. They hadn't known. He had been so desperate to know, for reassurance perhaps that this was really real but she had held fast. _Life's secrets, life's surprises. _They were rarely without at least one unfortunate outcome. This one wasn't.

Kerry looks at them. Having revealed the biggest secret of all. Just this morning Luka had, bilingually, asked their baby, their _son_, what he would be.

And before she realises it she's prepped for surgery. Coburn has arrived. How many times has she herself been in the position of the OB nurse who is assisting? A scary thought but oddly comforting. Coburn knows what she is doing.

The NICU team arrive solemnly, and Luka, in new blue surgical scrubs, eyes them warily. She knows he doesn't like all the technology but he is already grateful for the lengths they will go to, to help their child.

Later, when she recalls her son's birth, she remembers the jealousy as a dozen hands help her son breath, as she cannot move, cannot touch or comfort him. The helplessness is constricting, suffocating her and suddenly the room seems lighter, takes an ethereal edge.

The doctors are concerned, but her son's pulse rises and his skin loses its blueberry tinge. Tiny but stubborn, her father had called her that as a 5 year old, as she refused to climb down from the large branches of the tree in their local park. She had been safe then, from her mother's harsh tongue, which was filled with the venom of depression. Her son was stubborn too.

She remembers little after this, canisters filled with unending red, concerned eyes, stage whispers that she pretends not to hear. _Drastic measures._

As awakeness escapes her grasp, her thoughts twist to her family. Maggie, Eric and her father, Luka and baby boy Kovac. Finally fulfilled in life, she believed, perhaps, that this was her end, born to find a true beginning only to lose it as she found it. And her thoughts end with irony that at the moment she was truly complete so much was being taken away from her.

_Fin._

_Please review!_


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